The European Parliament elections have begun and a new European Commission will follow soon after. With all the change that is slated to come, it is imperative that the European Transparency Initiative (ETI) does not fall by the wayside.

Significant strides have been made since Siim Kallas, the European commissioner for administrative affairs, launched the ETI in 2005 but there is still much work to be done to make access to information easier and the registration of lobbyists and reporting of lobbying more complete.

One of the biggest arguments against stricter lobbying regulations in the EU has been that strict rules do not work in Washington. Why, then, would they work in Brussels? This is faulty logic. The reason why we see more undue influence of special interests in the US is not the failure of the lobbying disclosure and ethics regime, but rather our failure in the US to bring about real campaign-finance reform.

A balancing act

Despite the fact that lobbying regulations are quite different, lobbying in the US and the EU is remarkably similar, with lobbyists in both capitals lunching with policymakers, shuttling drafts of legislation back and forth, and holding ‘informational conferences’ in pleasant locations. The one big difference between the US and the EU is that the majority of policymakers in the EU institutions are not elected, and since they do not need to stand for elections, they do not need to find the significant amounts of cash to support campaigns. Instead of spending innumerable hours fundraising, they balance competing interests in an effort to produce policies that are seen as legitimate, though produced by a less-than-democratic supranational structure.

In the first large-scale comparative study of the two systems, researching the work of 150 lobbyists fighting over 47 different policy issues, half in the US and half in the EU, I found that the majority of advocates in the EU attained a compromised success – they got some of what they wanted, but so too did their opponents. Policy outcomes in the EU were more balanced; they took into consideration the input of all sides.

In the US, we see more winner-take-all outcomes, with some advocates getting everything they want, while others get nothing. If we break down lobbying success by the type of lobbyist, a more troubling picture emerges: we see that, more often than not, it is industry and business interests that win. In the US, 89% of corporations and 53% of trade associations succeed, while the majority of those fighting for the broader good – 60% of citizen groups and 63% of foundations – fail in their lobbying goals. This is because legislators in the US are beholden to the wealthy interests that will underwrite their next re-election bid. In the EU, we see that industry often wins as well (the success rates are 57% for trade associations and 61% for lobbying firms) but citizen groups and foundations fighting for the public good win at equal rates (56% and 67%). Policymakers in the EU do not need industry’s euros, so we do not see the same level of pandering to their interests.

The American electoral process makes these findings understandable. Re-election-driven legislators in the US are driven not only to get votes, but also to raise the huge amounts of money needed to mobilise those votes. It is wealthy individuals and interest groups that are in the position to provide the much-needed resources for the launch of a successful re-election bid. Thus we often see public-policy outputs that benefit corporate interests over the common interest.

The US lobbying disclosure regime at least allows us to track this undue influence, to shed some light on who is lobbying on what, how much they are spending and to what effect. The lobbying rules do not enable us to curb the influence of lobbyists (that will be the job of new campaign-financing regulations), but they do allow us to document their influence.

Maintaining momentum behind the ETI is critical if the EU wants European citizens to trust the institutions – only with transparency can we know who is lobbying on EU issues, who is being influential and if that influence is balanced between corporate interests and the common good.

Christine Mahoney is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, the director of the Moynihan European Research Centers and the author of Brussels versus the Beltway: Advocacy in the United States and the European Union. (Georgetown, 2008).

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Karsten

Currenly the US companies approach European regulators without any restrictions and use the dominance of the English language for their own advantage. This feels bad because SMEs are underrepresented. I am totally fed up with the astroturfs of Microsoft, AT&T and others and their despicable insults on European regulators. We need a foreign lobby transparency act! Kick the US corporations out and the EU may end up to become a democratic order.

Posted on 6/4/09 | 7:34 PM CET

Rousseau

The commentary doesn’t really let us know what any interest group is “winning” or “losing” relative to any baseline. It’s not clear if the writer is referring to a dollar and euro amount or the number of issues that get passed on behalf of select groups. Another question that arises is whether or not government is not already paying for “common good” services by providing what many “common good” interest groups are claiming to do a better job providing.